Danny Garcia is batting .232 for the Mets. AP

Danny Garcia is one of those undersized, scrappy underdogs who occasionally make it to the big leagues. The Mets second baseman also may be a good example of how the etiquette of baseball has changed.

Garcia exhibits more attitude than talent, a trait that likely helped propel him up the minor league ladder but does not go unnoticed in the majors. He is the kind of player who wears those hip Oakley sunglasses upside down on the brim of his cap -- in an indoor stadium. He yaps with umpires incessantly, usually to question a call.

Last weekend his act rubbed the Astros the wrong way, mostly because of an episode with Roy Oswalt, the Houston right-hander. Oswalt nearly hit Garcia with a pitch Friday in the third inning. Garcia popped out to right field to end that at-bat. On his way back to the dugout after rounding first base, Garcia made sure to swing close enough to Oswalt to deliver a message. "I'll get you," Garcia said as he jogged by the mound. Oswalt had a curious reaction. He laughed. "Why would I try to hit him?" Oswalt said. "He's the No. 8 hitter and he's been up in the big leagues for what, two weeks? What is he, a .260 hitter? And he says he's going to 'get' me? He's never done anything in this game to say that. I'll just file it away, that's all."

It wasn't long ago that young players were expected to act like well-behaved children. They were seen and not heard. They fetched coffee for veterans, spoke only when spoken to and always sat in the front of buses and planes. They did not dig into the batter's box with their spikes when facing established pitchers.

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Those days are gone. "I think the teams are to blame," Houston first baseman Jeff Bagwell said. "They start out by giving guys out of high school millions of dollars and contracts that guarantee they'll be in the big leagues by a certain time. Then they coddle them all the way through the system. They get used to having things given to them rather than having earned them."

It's that familiar sense of entitlement that is so recognizable throughout professional sports, a disease that actually begins on lower amateur levels.

Back to Garcia. He could hardly be classified as a spoiled bonus baby. The Mets drafted him in the fifth round in 2001. He is, though, an example of the kind of player unfamiliar with the game's old-school mentality. Back in the day, players, especially pitchers, could employ the game's version of frontier justice to take care of anyone who violated the established protocol. Those times are gone.

"The way the game is now you can't take care of business on the mound," Oswalt said. "All you have to do is just come up and in once and you're going to get warned [by the umpires] or thrown out of the game.

"I don't like seeing guys who've never done anything in this game acting like they've been around and been All-Stars. I'm talking about guys with 30 career home runs who go pimping around the bases when they hit a home run like they're Barry Bonds or something. I don't like seeing that."

Showmanship and individuality have a larger presence than ever in baseball thanks to the look-at-me Sportscenter-fication of sporting culture, both on and off the field. Uniforms are no longer uniform (MLB VP of baseball operations Sandy Alderson's effort to keep them so is waning.) The person reporting the sports news wants to be the news. So does the face-painting fan who dresses or acts outrageously enough to get on TV. Ditto the player who fancies himself a stylemaster. Pushed down the food-chain of importance is the what and how of the actual competition. It's not much unlike a movie project that begins with a big-name actor. A tautly written script? An interesting, multi-layered plot? Worry about such trivia later, if at all.

Indeed, baseball long ago stopped becoming a pastime and devolved into just another form of entertainment. Does that make the game worse? No. What we remember as "the good old days" are only what's left after we selectively choose to forget all the bad old days that happened along with them. These days aren't any worse. They are just different. There are many Danny Garcias out there, wearing their Oakleys indoors, making sure they are seen and heard.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci covers baseball for the magazine and is a regular contributor to SI.com.